Chapter 2: Why do we procrastinate?
The first step in overcoming any procrastination you face is to understand why you are procrastinating. It helps us understand why we keep on doing what we are doing. Why do we put things off easily? Several reason why we procrastinate are listed below:
Your brain does not perceive any immediate rewards associated with the task and as a result you quickly think of a way to escape from the work. When you procrastinate, you're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead you do something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt — which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a cycle.
All students from time to time lack interest in a course, however, not all of these students delay in studying or completing assignments. Throughout your life, you'll do many uninteresting things. Learning to read may be frustrating and uninteresting. Yet, reading will later prove useful, interesting, and entertaining.
Most procrastinators believe that something is wrong with them if they do not feel motivated to begin a task. Well, some activities just have “boring” written all over them. You procrastinate because you are not interested to do that certain task.
“I don’t feel like doing it!” We have the “living the moment” attitude and afterwards experience the “lazy feelings” not to take actions on them.
You feel that you deserve to have some fun before you get started on the job. You overestimate your efficiency and the amount of time left to perform the task, while underestimating the time needed to complete the task. You assure yourself that you’ll be able to work more efficiently with the deadline approaching fast.
You end up telling yourself that you’ll do the job early in the morning tomorrow, with a clear mind, when you feel more settled or rested. But when you wake up, you got distracted to do something else.
You keep forgetting to do it because you don’t think of it with high importance thus it always slip your mind.
Perhaps you are supposed to go to the Parent’s meeting after work. Your wife kept reminding you before you get out of your house early in that morning not to miss the meeting because it was important for your child, but not to you, you thought. That evening you went home late and realize that you’ve missed the meeting because you did something else after work.
“Oops! Something come up that needs to be done first. I’m busy. I’ll just do it later!”
“I don’t have much time right now, I’ll just do it tomorrow.”
One of the reasons why we procrastinate is because we dread spending long period of time working on a task. The problem with the excuse of doing the task tomorrow is that you’ll most likely to have the same excuse by tomorrow and thus you are also declaring to procrastinate tomorrow.
You keep on planning on doing something important to you like some projects. At first, you’re motivated and ready to make a killing. Then life gets in the way. You’ll make an excuse to do it tomorrow. You’ll miss a day or two to do what you are supposed to do. Then you miss more days doing the task. You are already behind the plan and the due date is coming real fast. And finally you walk away from that project because “you just don’t have the time.” Sounds familiar? Almost everyone has these moments, unless you’ve overcome it.
We get overwhelmed that we think there are lots of things to do to finish the task. Whenever you try to do something that is not part of your routine, it takes additional effort to finish the task especially if it is difficult or will take time to be completed.
Alternately, it may so happen that when you are required to do something out of your comfort zone, you get overwhelmed by the complexity or the ambiguity of the task, and so you delay it in favor of other simpler tasks, hoping to get someone to help you to do the bigger task.
Perfectionism causes fear of failure.
We have a tendency to negatively evaluate one's own performance. Expectations and standards set by parents may be so high that no one could actually live up to them. Thus, procrastination steps in to ruin these expectations and standards set by your loving parents and prevent you from "really" failing.
For most of us, the “I did not try and I failed” attitude is far acceptable than “I gave it my best and failed.” If you don't try it, you don't have to confront the possibility that you can't do it. It goes something like this: If I really try hard and fail, that is worse than if I don't try and end up failing.
A student who never studies and flunks out may feel bad about failing but what if he had studied, and still failed?
You procrastinate because you are fearful of the consequences of your achievements. Maybe you’re afraid that if you do well, then next time, people will be expecting more of you. People will start thinking that you are a God and never fall back. Or, perhaps, succeeding may place you in the spotlight when you prefer just staying in the background.
If you do pass the course, people will expect you to go out and get a job, or to apply what you've learned. If you never try, you'll never have to face the consequences of success, either.
You don’t want to finish it because you are afraid to know what will happen next. You want to avoid the question, “What’s next?” Sometimes not knowing what’s next seems more acceptable than the possible consequences of finding out for sure. We let this fear prevent you from ever trying.
"If I pass the course, I'll graduate. If I graduate, I'll . . ." what’s next? If you don't pass the course, you'll never have to find out what will happen next.